HOW RACISM INFLUENCED THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

jgoodguy

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The great irony of Jefferson–and really of the entire Enlightenment–was using language that was never meant to free anyone but wealthy white men to inspire revolutions around the world that these writers would have despised. Such is the duality of the American thing.
 

Matt McKeon

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The great irony of Jefferson–and really of the entire Enlightenment–was using language that was never meant to free anyone but wealthy white men to inspire revolutions around the world that these writers would have despised. Such is the duality of the American thing.
I read that thread, and didn't find it convincing, although the 1774 meeting was news to me. The resistance to the British was strongest in New England the region where slavery was weakest. There was still slavery in Massachusetts, but the biggest slave owner, Isaac Royall was a staunch loyalist.
 

jgoodguy

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I read that thread, and didn't find it convincing, although the 1774 meeting was news to me. The resistance to the British was strongest in New England the region where slavery was weakest. There was still slavery in Massachusetts, but the biggest slave owner, Isaac Royall was a staunch loyalist.
Without the Slave South onboard, there is no successful revolution, IMHO.
 

jgoodguy

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I don't disagree. But I do disagree with the post in LGM that the Revolution was fought to protect slavery.
Imho depends on who was doing the fighting.
 

5fish

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I don't disagree. But I do disagree with the post in LGM that the Revolution was fought to protect slavery.
The English Black Militia did motivate white Southerners to join the cause for freedom from England... I would say freeing the slave brought the southern states firmly into the cause...


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John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, formed what he termed “Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment” in the fall of 1775 from the several hundred slaves who escaped their servitude to join him, as he fled Williamsburg to organize a small army of loyalists and British soldiers on the coast near Norfolk. In November, Dunmore published a proclamation promising freedom to servants and slaves able to bear arms, and enough joined him to make up half of the force that first routed the Virginia militia at Kemp’s Landing and then, in December, suffered a devastating defeat at Great Bridge on the Elizabeth River. By then, Dunmore reported to London, that nearly three hundred men of the Ethiopian Regiment were clad in uniforms embroidered with the provocative words “liberty to slaves.Patriot writers reacted with fear and fury to the threat posed by this first systematic freeing and arming of the South’s black labor force.

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The formation of Dunmore’s Regiment marked a significant turn in both British policy and American race relations for its members were the first of an estimated 12,000 blacks who served with British forces in North America during the Revolutionary War. Their reception by the British was one factor that prompted the Continental Congress, by 1777, to rescind its November 1775 declaration that blacks were ineligible to serve in the Continental Army, and led to the first significant enrolments of free blacks and then slaves in the patriot forces.
 

5fish

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You know most America Indian tribes backed the Brits in our Revolutionary war... @diane It was ruinous for them...


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The MOHAWK chief THAYENDANEGEA (known to Anglo-Americans as JOSEPH BRANT) was the most important Iroquois leader in the Revolutionary Era. He convinced four of the six Iroquois nations to join him in an alliance with the British and was instrumental in leading combined Indian, British, and Loyalist forces on punishing raids in western New York and Pennsylvania in 1778 and 1779. These were countered by a devastating Patriot campaign into Iroquois country that was explicitly directed by General Washington to both engage warriors in battle and to destroy all Indian towns and crops so as to limit the military threat posed by the Indian-British alliance.

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In spite of significant Native American aid to the British, the European treaty negotiations that concluded the war in 1783 had no native representatives. Although Ohio and Iroquois Indians had not surrendered nor suffered a final military defeat, the United States claimed that its victory over the British meant a victory over Indians as well. Not surprisingly, due to their lack of representation during treaty negotiations, Native Americans received very poor treatment in the diplomatic arrangements. The British retained their North American holdings north and west of the Great Lakes, but granted the new American republic all land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. In fact, this region was largely unsettled by whites and mostly inhabited by Native Americans. As a Wea Indian complained about the failed military alliance with the British, "In endeavoring to assist you it seems we have wrought our own ruin." Even groups like the ONEIDA, one of the Iroquois nations that allied with the Americans, were forced to give up TRADITIONAL LANDS with other native groups.
 
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